For years, businesses that sell products or provide services have provided their customers or clients with avenues to register comments, complaints or suggestions relevant to the products or services provided by the business. These avenues have included customer feedback postcards and toll free numbers that consumers may call to speak with a service representative.
Traditionally, received feedback postcards have been filed in an order relevant to the products or services to which they pertain. Any analysis of the data provided by the postcards required a data analyst to individually process handwritten, and sometimes unreadable, postcards to determine trends in the customer comments on the postcards.
Service representatives answering toll free lines have traditionally completed paper-based customer comment forms as they speak to the customer. These handwritten comment forms were processed in a mariner similar to the postcards. Specifically, they were filed and hand-analyzed by a data analyst at a later time.
In recent years, the advent of the computer has modified how customer feedback is acquired, retained and processed. Handwritten data from feedback postcards may now be keyed or scanned into, and stored by, a computer in an electronic format. Similarly, computer use has simplified the acquisition of information that is provided by customers during calls. Specifically, service representatives may now use a computer terminal with an interface that allows the input of various pieces of information including, for example, an identification of the product or service about which the call was made, the time and date of the call and the comments made by the caller. Additionally, the popularity of network communications over the Internet now allows businesses to receive customer comments via electronic mail (email) and web page feedback techniques.
Although the use of computers has simplified the acquisition of customer feedback from telephone calls, the value of the acquired data is dependent on the level of detail the receiving service representatives enter into their terminal user interfaces. Ideally, the service representatives would enter all of the callers' comments into the terminal. However, while some service representatives may enter lengthy customer comments, others may enter very brief descriptions. These brief descriptions may or may not be succinct and descriptive sentences that are meaningful. Accordingly, the quality of the information acquired depends solely on the quality of the service representative's characterization of the telephone call with the customer.
Once information pertaining to customer feedback has been acquired electronically, it is useful to analyze the collected data to determine, for example, where improvements in products or services should be made. As noted, the information acquired for each product or service may be analyzed by an analyst who looks for trends in the feedback. Hand analysis of the data is a time consuming and arduous task. If a business offers many products or services, many person-hours must be spent analyzing the customer feedback to determine a trend in the data.